from the outset. According to this theory, the institution of the calendar
cannot be dated exactly to 2781– 2778 BCE, but rather more loosely to some
time in the early third millenniumBCE, when I Akhet coincided roughly with
the beginning of the inundation; any attempt at further precision is futile.^27
The drifting calendar and the Sothic yearIn some respects, the drift of the civil calendar from the solar year and the
seasons (by one day in four years) was not a majorflaw. It was too slow and
gradual to affect any individual in his lifetime: in a lifespan of, for example,
sixty years, the calendar would only have drifted byfifteen days, which means
that the months of the year would still have been occurring in approximately
the same seasons.^28 Many people would not have been sensitive to this drift;
even if they were (e.g. through stellar observation, or because they had been
told of it), in practical terms it would not have made much of a difference.
Yet even if this drift was inconsequential in the short term of an individual
human life, no one could have ignored the long-term effect it was having on
the civil calendar. For there were periods in history when the calendar months
of‘inundation’, Akhet, would have occurred a half a year before the inunda-
tion of the Nile actually took place. It seems remarkable, from a modern
perspective, that a calendar so conspicuously out of step with the seasons—
which its month-names were meant to represent—should have lasted as long
as three millennia. This perhaps has encouraged modern scholars to search for
evidence of an alternative calendar, in which the year regularly began at the
heliacal rising of Sothis, and which was reckoned in Egypt alongside the
drifting year of the civil calendar.^29
Evidence of a Sothic calendar has been drawn, almost entirely, from the
so-called Ebers calendar (late sixteenth centuryBCE). This important text will
(^27) Clagett (1989–99) ii. 32–3. According to this theory, the heliacal rising of Sothis could have
become associated with the New Year at a later stage, in the second millenniumBCE.Itis
important to note that the inundation of the Nile, a seasonal event related to equinoxes and
solstices, is not in a constant relationship with the rising of Sothis: because of the precession of
equinoxes, the latter occurs progressively later than the solstice. In the early third millennium
BCE, when the summer solstice was on about 17 July, the rising of Sothis occurred in Egypt at the
solstice or earlier (see above, nn. 18–20), which means that itprecededthe beginning of
inundation in upper Egypt by some days; it is only in the second millennium that Sothis
proceeded to the season of inundation and rose at the beginning of it (nowadays, Sothis rises
about 1½ month after the solstice: Bomhard 1999: 26). This reinforces perhaps the view that the
New Year (I Akhet,‘inundation’) could only have become associated with Sothis in the second
millenniumBCE.
(^28) Weill (1926) 55–6; also Depuydt (1997) 19, who assumes an average life-span of 30– 40
years, hence a ten-day drift.
(^29) See most recently Bomhard (1999), effectively a popularized version ofWeill (1926),
(1928), (1946).
The Egyptian Calendar 133